Friday, August 31, 2007

I am supposed to do a reading at a wedding. This is the sort of thing I agonize over. Finding THE perfect thing to read that reflects my two friends and also reflects me. And somehow reflects the fall season and reflects this strange subtropical swamp we live in. I guess that is a lot.

I've thought of a poem by a man named Steve Scafidi from his book Sparks from a Nine Pound Hammer. I think he's a very good poet. Raw and masculine and romantic at once. The poem is very sweet. Very sweet is not how I would describe my friends. But the poem is also hopeful. And my friends, like anyone plunging into marriage, hold the very kind of hope that Steve Scafidi so simply captures. I like the poem, but I am not convinced that it fits. I thought that today, I would write about these two friends. Maybe in the end it will help me decipher the "right" reading.

So. About L. + C.:

I have two friends who are crazy and who I love. And they are getting married.

And there is something entirely foolish about getting married in the first place, but I wonder how much crazier it is when the people involved are also crazy? I don't mean certifiable, or bad, or unprepared to marry. Just this: These two friends each possess an equal presence – a presence that is like an igniting spark – one that will set something big ablaze. If anything, they are, in their craziness, brave and extreme. Like all of us crazy people who plunge into the deep end that is marriage.

But that they are brave and extreme is not surprising. C. is a swimmer. It was a swimming scholarship that brought him from Indiana down to the swampy south. He once handcuffed himself to his best friend, and they swam across the Mississippi River in the middle of the night. Do you know anything about the Mississippi? If you do, you know it is a working river that barges and ships actively navigate, and you know it is full of pesticide run-off and petro-chemical waste that enter it beginning at its far away northern starting point. And in Baton Rouge, it is thousands of feet from one side to the other, if not more. But you might also know that the Mississippi is muddy brown because it is one of the most nutrient rich bodies of water in the entire country. And for C. to come all the way down from Indiana to swim, having read at some point I am sure, Tom Sawyer, and NOT to cuff himself to his very best friend (a Huck Finn of sorts) and swim across the river, THAT would be crazy. And as angry as L. was at the time, this quality in him, is exactly the reason L. could fall in love with him to begin with.

And L. – It’s more difficult to capture what “crazy” means when you are describing her. You could try with this: It means her eyebrows are raised to you, and she is grinning, and the grin is saying, “I dare you.” And you will have to wait to see what the dare is. It will unfold while you have a few drinks with her, and then a few more. Maybe it is jumping into a swimming pool fully clothed. Maybe it’s splashing around in the rain one day. L. being crazy could also mean, “DON’T TREAD ON ME. I WILL GET ANGRY," and you will be, rightfully, frightened. It could mean this too – she might come to you in sheer and sad panic because it has suddenly occurred to her that if she lost someone she loves (someone who is perfectly healthy and not expected to be lost at present), she might be too devastated to know how to handle this, and she’ll want to ask you, “How would I be okay?” More than anything, it means, while verbalizing her own neurosis with humor she doesn’t even intend in the moment, that she will tackle anything. Imagine her – 5’4” learning to weld a metal sculpture four times her size. Learning and succeeding. And certainly, it is her potent mixture of daring and neurosis and determination that compel C. to love her.

So what does a person read to two crazy people who are doing something utterly crazy?

Do you give advice? Like this, from a poem called “A Gift by the Sea”: “When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanence, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity -- in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.”

Or do you offer an anecdote of challenges to come? Like this. Three months into my marriage my husband and I had the worst fight I can remember having. Yet, I cannot recall what the fight was over. What I recall is how much it hurt, how ugly we had been as angry and impassioned human beings. And that later, I believed we had been testing the waters and one another through our ugliness, skirting the question, “How unconditional is your love, now that we are linked inextricably?”

Would it be best to seize the romance of this day? To recite, “How do I love thee, let me count the ways?”

Nothing seems quite right.

L. and C., in the midst of their own craziness, are also creators of tactile bliss. Of music. I have heard the way L. sings. Of art. I have seen his prints and the way that C. draws the ocean. Of impromptu dinners and of gardens grown together. I have witnessed stubborn plants finally take root and grow in the soil they dig, in the beds they bicker about wanting to water.

I have already seen them suffer loss, and in that suffering, collapse into and console one another.

And I have often witnessed them in the center of limitless electric fun -- causing and experiencing rapture and adventure.

Really, they’ve already moved together through some of life’s foolishness. They are already equipped with the experiences to navigate the ebbs and flows of what is unpredictable and uncertain Marriage.

Maybe all that can be offered really is the mere hope so simply expressed in the poem by Steve Scafidi.

"Prayer for a Marriage"

When we are old one night and the moon
arcs over the house like an antique
China saucer and the teacup sun

follows somewhere far behind
I hope the stars deepen to a shine
so bright you could read by it

if you liked and the saddnesses
we will have known go away
for awhile--in this hour or two

before sleep--and that we kiss
standing in the kitchen not fighting
gravity so much as embodying

its sweet force, and I hope we kiss
like we do today knowing so much
good is said in this primitive tongue

from the wild first surprising ones
to the lower dizzy ten thousand
infinitely slower ones--and I hope

while we stand here in the kitchen
making tea and kissing, the whistle
of the teapot wakes the neighbors.

Hopes for a lifetime of navigating together all the sparks, whistles, bells, sirens. Those signals that indicate caution, excitement, sadness and joy, and sometimes, like a tea kettle, absolute calm.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

This all began with my mother. My mother who died one year ago, come Monday.

Six months ago I knew it was time to quit my job, a fast paced, demanding, but also rewarding position in the field of urban and rural planning and community development. I knew that it was time to pursue a new endeavor. Writing. Not really a new endeavor, but a prematurely abandoned endeavor. I knew this with indescribable internal clarity.

I have been writing since I was a child. I never knew if I was good. I just knew I loved to write.

In college, some time in 1995 at the end of a short story writing workshop, my instructor asked me, "Do you know that you know how to write? Really well?" It gave me permission to dream something I'd before been too timid to envision.

I graduated. I moved from the dirty and beloved South to New York. I landed a job at a publishing house. I thought I would work for a while, keep writing, end up in graduate school to get an MFA, begin teaching in whatever university would have me, continue to write, and be on my merry way as a writer. Maybe, one day, even a published writer. This is what the future looked like.

Two months later, my mom had a stroke. A massive and debilitating stroke. Six months into my first real job, I found myself quitting so I could move to my parents' home in northern Virginia to help take care of her. I never wanted to write again. It was not an intentional or conscious lack of desire. I stopped writing as naturally as I had begun. (One day as a ten year old, I was exploring a world atlas and came across Africa. I surveyed the continent. I found Sudan. A narrative poem was born about a girl who'd had to leave Sudan in the midst of war and famine. It was written in first person. What did I know of Sudan other than that, according to the atlas, the Nile flowed through it?)

After taking care of my mom, I found myself working in another publishing house, this time a small university press in Louisiana where I'd grown up and gone to college. I began asking myself, If I am never a writer, what else can I do that will be fulfilling? I'd come to the conclusion that working in publishing was not the answer. I decided that the answer was this: Something creative. Something that had to do with understanding people and place. Something that could better the world in which we live. Something project driven. I applied to graduate school to study landscape architecture. I went through the three-year program. (It took me four.) It was sheer torture. The entire time.

I got a job. A job I loved (thank god, after the way I'd hated grad school). A job that challenged me and stimulated my intellect. I worked for an amazing woman and with other amazing people. I advanced and advanced and advanced quickly over three years. I kept getting 15% raises. This seemed absurd. (I also worked my ass off. Late nights, early mornings, sleepless nights, heels that were too high worn for workdays that lasted too long.)

This is what happened on August15, 2006. I was driving to work one morning, and a phrase came into my head: I might say something dangerous.I mused that it would be a good way to begin a story. Then, three or four blocks away from my office, something started writing itself in my head. A poem.

I might say somethingdangerous.

I don't know whenI beganswallowingmy words.

Or whyI thoughtit should be a crimenotto hide themin the back of my throat.

It has beena long time.

You might hearabout the boysand the women,the glistening babies,or my old mother,my old mother,my old sick mother.

The peopleand their storiesthat I havestoppedtelling.

You mighthear them.

I couldsay somethingdangerous.Or true.Both.

And then what would you do?

I committed the poem to memory, and when I got home that evening, I wrote it down.

I am a woman who keeps many journals. When I die, if someone finds them, they'll see that my personality and my sanity were disjointed. That is to say, I keep several journals over a period of time. I might write in one one day, and the next day, I might make note of something in another journal. Then I might abandon the journals altogether for several months or years, pick one up and write in it, and the following day write in yet another journal. You'd have to map the dates out in a set of five our six journals if you wanted order or chronology as opposed to the ethereal mood I was in when I selected which journal I would write in on which day.

But I have one journal, an object of art, that my husband (then boyfriend) began making 1997. He completed it and gave it to me in 1998. Fresh out of college, I was still writing at the time. He intended the journal for whatever I might write in years to come. The journal, a thick book with six sections separated by woodcuts of insects on rice paper, was so goddamn beautiful to me that I could not bring myself to write a single word in it. In 2001, long after I'd stopped writing, I decided it was time to put it to use. It became the first journal I used as a student of landscape architecture. I didn't entirely fill the pages before switching to a new journal, but it contained nothing except sketches and ideas for plans to be drafted, for spaces to be created.

That night in 2006, as I was about to commit the first new work I'd written since 1998 to paper, I scanned my bookshelf to choose a journal. The one my husband had given me was the one I selected. For the first time, I wrote in it what he had intended it to contain all those years before.

The following week, I pulled out my old short stories. I began rereading them, editing some furiously. One night, sitting in bed, just having completed edits to an old story, I had a thought. I thought, Maybe when my mom dies, I'll pursue writing in a real way. Then I'll have two people pulling for me.My first creative writing teacher, the man who'd asked me if I knew I could write, the man who chose to act for a short time as my mentor, had passed away in the spring of 1998, just before I graduated college.It's not that I expected my mom to die soon. I certainly did not wish that to be the case. It's just that I'd come to accept what the stroke had done to her for all these years. I'd come to accept that she was aging and was unhealthy. And I was, for the first time, acknowledging that she only had a limited time on this earth. (Who wants to believe her parents are mortal?) If you were to ask me on that night, I'd have said, I think my mom's got five or seven years left in her. If you were to have asked me on that night what I hoped for, I'd have said, I want my parents to have a 50th wedding anniversary. That means I need her to be here for another seven years, minimum.

This is what happened on August 27, 2006, twelve days after the first time I'd written something new in eight years and a week after it occurred to me that in the future I might pursue writing, this is what happened. My mother died. My mother died. It makes my throat swell just to write the words, just to see them spelled out, just to hear them in my head. My mother died. I was not ready. I needed seven more years, minimum. I needed those years.

I'd already grieved for her once when I was twenty-four and she had had the stroke, and I lost the woman who I'd known as my mother just as we were beginning to outgrow our angst with one another. And now, at thirty-one, I lost her again and permanently, the woman I'd come to know and love as my second mom, the person she became after the stroke. I felt cheated. I guess I still feel cheated. And like I was too young for this to happen, both times. I try to remind myself that I am not the only human being on earth who has lost a mother. That my three sisters also lost their mom. That women younger than I am have lost mothers and lose them all the time. That some women never get to have mothers, and I had two.

I'm not going to go into the details of how I have grieved, how I continue to grieve. I'll say this. Six months after she died, I knew with certainty I needed to quit my job. I realized I'd taken a short-cut, which turned out -- like many short-cuts -- to be the longer route. When I had decided to figure out what I might do that could fulfill me if I never became a writer, I had skipped something entirely. I had never attempted to pursue writing in the first place.

Once, when I was young, my mother said to me, "Every time you begin something, you quit." It was an innocent remark on her part, but it stuck with me forever. Forever. (The context of the comment - she didn't want to shell out cash for some lesson or class I was begging to take because I'd quit ballet; I'd quit Brownies; I'd quit violin; if I'd started it, I'd quit it -- you name it. And all my starting and stopping was costing her money!) If I were in therapy now, this comment is one of the things I'm certain I would dissect. It's one of the moments I am certain I would discover has handicapped me for years. (It's also the very comment that pushed me through four miserable years as a landscape architecture student. Every time I wanted to quit, I heard her voice, I heard that statement.)

Innocently, I'd forecasted that when she died, I would not only begin writing again, but would pursue it in a real way. I'd practically assigned it to myself as homework. And my mother died just days after I'd dished out the assignment, long before I'd intended it to be due.Here I am now. I left my job at the end of May. I am a writer. I am not a published writer. But I am a writer. This means I work at it every day. This means I have produced some short stories. This means I agonize over what a character would do or say and whether what I've written is boring or inauthentic. This means I am chronically terrified of revising and editing in spite of my overwhelming awareness that it needs to happen. It means I carry fear, in my heart, that I'll wake up one day handicapped with writers' block.

It means I am just vain enough to believe that what I write is good enough to submit to editors. That I am vain enough to ignore rejections and to keep writing and to keep submitting. It means I fantasize again that, given a series of circumstances, I'll be on my merry way as a writer. It means I am practical enough to create those circumstances, including having begun freelance writing (because a girl's got to have cash and a resume). And I am mature enough to know that I have to be disciplined and not merely "inspired." This also means I am blogging for the first time in my life. If you had asked me a year ago if I'd start a blog, I might have asked blankly, "A what?" Or I may just have declared, "No way."

But here I am. Spinning out every thread of every spool of the written word. Yes, I want to be published. Doesn't every writer? Mostly, though, I feel a lot like I felt when I was ten years old and staring at a map of Sudan in a world atlas. Like this -- like writing is the best way for me to absorb the world and to then spit out what that world means to me. My most natural way to make sense of the places in which I dwell, the interior and the exterior. It's not sheer torture the way that grad school was. It is sheer joy, and it is also something I feel compelled to do. More than anything, when I say that I am a writer, it means this: I am attempting.

And attempting, somehow, someway, I know, began with my mother. It may very well be the one thing I will not quit. I've decided, so what if I say something dangerous? Moreover, so what if I fail? It would be more dangerous and a deeper failure to say nothing at all. This is clear.

About Me

I was in fifth grade the first time I imagined myself as a writer. But trying to live out that image seemed impossible and impractical. So I studied English and worked in publishing. I thought working in the world of writing would satisfy my desire. Instead I felt frustrated not playing the role I wanted to play within that world. I tried to figure out what else I could do that would be practical and creative at once and went back to school for landscape architecture, which led me to work as a rural and urban community planner. Then my mother died, and I found myself asking,"Do you really want to get to the end of your life knowing you never tried to do what you love and long to do?" Now I have my MFA in creative writing. Sometimes I write fiction, and I try to get it published. I think it's worthy and believe some editor will think the same. Sometimes I write this blog, which is less composed, a kind of word-purge. I may never live the precise image I saw in fifth grade, but I am satisfied trying. And if I do achieve that image, it will no doubt be at a slow pace. I have always been a turtle.